KIRKUS REVIEW

Edgy humor and fierce imagery coexist in these stories with
shrewd characterization and humane intelligence, inspired by volatile material
sliced off the front pages.

The state of race relations in post-millennial America haunts
most of the stories in this debut collection. Yet Adjei-Brenyah brings to what
pundits label our “ongoing racial dialogue” a deadpan style, an acerbic
perspective, and a wicked imagination that collectively upend readers’
expectations. “The Finkelstein 5,” the opener, deals with the furor surrounding
the murder trial of a white man claiming self-defense in slaughtering five
black children with a chainsaw. The story is as prickly in its view toward
black citizens seeking their own justice as it is pitiless toward white bigots
pressing for an acquittal. An even more caustic companion story, “Zimmer Land,”
is told from the perspective of an African-American employee of a mythical
theme park whose white patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of
dispensing brutal justice to people of color they regard as threatening on
sight, or “problem solving," as its mission statement calls it. Such
dystopian motifs recur throughout the collection: “The Era,” for example,
identifies oppressive class divisions in a post-apocalyptic school district
where self-esteem seems obtainable only through regular injections of a
controlled substance called “Good.” The title story, meanwhile, riotously
reimagines holiday shopping as the blood-spattered zombie movie you sometimes
fear it could be in real life. As alternately gaudy and bleak as such visions
are, there’s more in Adjei-Brenyah’s quiver besides tough-minded satire, as
exhibited in “The Lion & the Spider,” a tender coming-of-age story cleverly
framed in the context of an African fable.

INTERVIEW WITH NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH

It’s rare to find a short story collection—much less a debut one—that contains so many narrative worlds that they collapse into one highly alarming, present moment. Alternating between fiction and science-fiction, the stories in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Blackglide along the wave of racial disparities in America, though ...

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